How to Be Things with Words: Ibn ʿArabī's Theory and Practice of Language

What is the function of language? Is it merely a tool for communicating thoughts, or can we understand it as something more—as a medium that structures our engagement with the world? These are some of the questions that underpin Ibn ʿArabī’s magnum opus al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya, ‘The Meccan Openings’, and wider work. However, Ibn ʿArabī (1165 – 1240 CE/560 – 638 AH) was by no means an anomaly in his own time. Such semantic concerns were central to the work of scholars across disciplines in the premodern Islamicate world. Questions around the purpose and limits of language intersected not only with discussions of semantics and hermeneutics, but also metaphysics, epistemology, and pragmatics, and thus drew a variety of responses. The study of logic and grammar has tended to dominate scholarship of the philosophy of language in the premodern Islamic world. However, recent scholarship has highlighted the significance of theories of language developed in other domains. In parallel, scholars of the occult sciences in premodern and early modern Islamic world have examined the importance of approaches to language that theorised the cosmological significance of letters and called attention to their role within the development of practical techniques in the fields of, for example, medicine, political forecasting, and alchemy.

For Ibn ʿArabī, language was more than just a vehicle for human thought; the relationship between linguistic forms and mental contents offered a model for investigating the world. Ibn ʿArabī drew on premodern understandings of human speech and writing in order to articulate overlapping networks of correspondences between letters and components of the material, celestial, and social realms. These networks provided a framework not only for investigating the world, but also intervening within it through practical techniques. In his theory of language, Ibn ʿArabī drew on diverse sources and approaches, which reflected his interaction with extensive social and educational networks that stretched across the premodern Islamicate world. Ibn ʿArabī’s theory of language would in turn go onto form part of a larger corpus of theories and texts that later scholars, including Ṣāʾin al-Dīn Turka Iṣfahānī (1369 – 1432 CE/771 – 835 AH) and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī (d. 1454 CE/858 AH), employed to frame and legitimise their own theories and practices of language. These scholars were engaged in an informal intellectual network that developed a shared corpus of texts and techniques across the Timurid, Ottoman, and Mamluk courts. In this way, the later reception of Ibn ʿArabī’s theory of language also offers a lens through which we can examine continuity and change in how scholars of the Islamic tradition perceived and constructed the relationship between language, mind, and reality across periods and geographies.